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As soon as you get into drinking, you immediately realize how often it’s done horrifyingly wrong.
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Aug 25, 2019 19:54
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monkeytennis posted:Lol I was in a new-ish Italian place with my wife last week and after dinner I ordered an espresso and a cognac. I think the waiter was new because he asked me how I wanted my cognac served. I was very polite and said ‘just in a glass will be fine’ and he said ‘would you like ice?’. I sighed but I could see my wife giving me ‘the look’ so I just said no thanks. Two minutes later he turned up with it served in a highball glass Me irl: https://youtu.be/tDyLPyYCM1U
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Aug 25, 2019 20:25
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Chapter 23: Naked Warfarequote:Bond shot upwards out of the escape hatch in a blast of compressed air. Far above him the surface of the sea was a glittering plate of quicksilver bubbling and swirling with the small waves that Bond was glad to see had materialized. The balloon of air rushed on past him and he watched it hit the silver ceiling like a small bomb. There was a sharp pain in his ears. To get decompression he fought with his fins and slowed down until he hung suspended ten feet below the surface. Below him the long black shape of the Manta looked sinister and dangerous. He thought of the electric light blazing inside her and a hundred men going about their business. It gave him a creepy feeling. Now there came a great explosion from the escape hatch as if the Manta was firing at Bond and the black projectile of Leiter shot up at him through the burst of silver air-bubbles. Bond moved out of his path and swam on up to the surface. Cautiously he looked above the small flurry of the waves. The Disco, still blacked out, lay stopped less than a mile away to his left. There were no signs of activity on board. A mile to the north lay the long dark outline of Grand Bahama edged with the white of sand and small waves. There were small patches of broken white on the coral and niggerheads in the intervening water. Above the island, on top of the tall rocket gantries that showed as indistinct black skeletons, the red aircraft warning lights winked on and off. Bond got his bearings and quietly jack-knifed his body down below the surface. He stopped at about ten feet and, keeping his body like a compass needle along the course he would have to follow, lay, paddling softly with his fins to keep position, and waited for the rest of his team. Just as Bond predicted, the Disco is where he said it would be and their sonar is picking up signs of what looks like their dive team moving to plant the bomb. Once Bond and Leiter's team is underway, the Manta is going to close on the Disco just below the surface and wait to see what happens. Fallon is under orders to fire a second flare if they start losing the battle, at which point the Manta will come up shooting and try to board the yacht. quote:Bond felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Leiter. He grinned through his mask and jerked up a thumb. Bond took a quick look behind him. The men lay spread out in a rough wedge, their fins and hands working slowly as they marked time in the water. Bond nodded and got going, moving forward with a slow, even trudge, one hand at his side and the other holding his spear up the shaft against his chest. Behind him, the black wedge fanned out into formation and cruised forward like some giant delta-winged stingray on the prowl. They close in on the Disco and Bond pops above the surface for a moment, verifying that he's got the right yacht about 600 yards from the beach. A hundred yards away in a lagoon surrounded by coral, he sees another diver's head quickly pop up and duck back down. Bond goes back below, signals the Navy divers, and begins the attack. quote:Now it was only a question of speed and careful navigation among the occasional higher outcrops. Fish squirted out of his path and all the reef seemed to waken with the shock-wave of the twelve hastening bodies. Fifty yards on, Bond signalled to slow, to fan out in the attacking line. Then he crept on again, his eyes, aching and bloodshot with the strain, boring ahead through the jagged shapes amongst the pale mist. Yes! There was the glitter of white flesh, and there and there. Bond’s arm made the hurling signal for the attack. He plunged forward, his spear held in front of him like a lance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNL3POV6OoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFxM0j2WtSs The film spices things up with the underwater battle being a full military operation, with Coast Guard divers parachuting from a plane with spear guns. The scene was filmed at Clifton Pier off Nassau and coordinated by Ricou Browning, who played the Gill-Man in The Creature from the Black Lagoon during the underwater sequences and is currently the only surviving Universal Classic Monster actor. quote:The battleground had now shifted to a wide expanse of clear water fringed with broken coral. On the far side of this, Bond saw the grounded sled laden with something long and bulky with a rubber covering, the silver torpedo of the Chariot, and a close group of men that included the unmistakable, oversize figure of Largo. Bond melted back among the coral clumps, got close down to the sand and began to swim cautiously round the flank of the big clear pool. Almost immediately he had to stop. A squat figure was cowering in the shadows. His gun was raised and he was taking careful aim. It was at Leiter, in difficulties with one of Largo’s men who had him by the throat while Leiter, the swim fin on his hook gone, clawed with the hook at the man’s back. Bond gave two hard kicks of his flippers and hurled his spear from six feet. The light wood of the handle had no momentum, but the blade cut into the man’s arm just as the bubbles of gas burst from the muzzle of the gun. His shot went wide, but he flashed round and thrust at Bond with the empty gun. Out of the corner of his eye Bond saw his spear floating slowly up towards the surface. He dived for the man’s legs in a clumsy rugby tackle and clawed them off the ground. Then, as the gun muzzle hit him on the temple, he reached a desperate hand for the enemy’s mask and ripped it off his face. That was enough. Bond swam aside and watched the man, blinded by the salt water, groping his way up towards the surface. Bond felt a nudge at his arm. It was Leiter, clutching at his oxygen tube. His face inside the mask was contorted. He made a feeble gesture upwards. Bond got the message. He seized Leiter round the waist and leaped for the surface fifteen feet up. As they broke through the silver ceiling, Leiter tore the broken tube from his mouth and gulped frantically for air. Bond held him through the paroxysm and then guided him to a clump of shallow coral and when Leiter pushed him angrily away and told him to get the hell back under and leave him alone, he put up a thumb and dived down again. Bond takes off after Largo, passing the maskless corpse of one of the Navy divers, and rearms himself with two fired spears. He finds the sled with the bomb guarded by two SPECTRE agents on the edge of the lagoon, but no Largo. He can't decide whether to attack or wait for the rescue dinghy. quote:With frightening suddenness, the decision was made for him. Out of the mists to Bond’s right the gleaming torpedo shape of the electric Chariot shot into the arena. Largo sat astride it in the saddle. He was bent down behind the small perspex shield to get extra speed and his left hand held two of the Manta spears pointing forward while he controlled the single joystick with his right. As he appeared, the two guards dropped their guns on the sand and held up the coupling of the sled. Largo slowed down and drifted up to them. One man caught the rudder and wrestled to pull the Chariot backwards towards the couplings. They were going to get out! Largo was going to take the bomb back out through the reef and drop it in deep water or bury it! The same thing would be done with the second bomb in the Disco. With the evidence gone, Largo would say that he had been ambushed by rival treasure hunters. How was he to know they came from a United States submarine? His men had fought back with their shark guns, but only because they had been attacked first. As the SPECTRE men wrestle to attach the sled to the submersible, Bond shoots forward with his dual spears. Both attacks are parried or glance off Largo's air tanks, so he tries to grab Largo's mask off. Largo's flailing hits the joystick, sending the Chariot surging toward the surface as the two of them hang on. quote:It was impossible to fight scientifically. Both men tore vaguely at each other while their teeth clenched desperately on the rubber mouthpieces that were their lifelines, but Largo had a firm grip of the Chariot between his knees while Bond had to use one hand to hang on to Largo’s equipment to prevent himself being thrown. Again and again Largo’s elbow crashed into Bond’s face while Bond dodged from side to side to take the blows on the mouth and not on the precious glass of his mask. At the same time Bond hammered with his free hand at his only target, Largo’s kidneys, beneath the brown square of flesh that was all he could reach. As the Chariot zooms off into the open water, Bond tries to dive for the coral but Largo easily follows him. Bond finds that the passage through the coral is too narrow for him to turn around, forcing him into an open area that Largo has already spotted from above and is waiting for Bond to enter. They both arm themselves: Bond with a rock and Largo with...a baby octopus? quote:Slowly he advanced between the walls of coral, the big hands held forward for the first hold. At ten paces he stopped. His eyes swivelled sideways to a coral clump. His right hand shot out at something and gave a quick yank. When the hand pulled back, it was writhing, writhing with eight more fingers. Largo held the baby octopus in front of him like a small, waving flower. His teeth drew away from the rubber mouthpiece and the clefts of a smile appeared in his cheeks. He put up one hand and significantly tapped his mask. Bond bent down and picked up a rock covered with seaweed. Largo was being melodramatic. A rock in Largo’s mask would be more efficient than having an octopus slapped across his. Bond wasn’t worried by the octopus. Only a day before he had been in company with a hundred of them. It was Largo’s longer reach that worried him. Maybe Largo's played a lot of Yakuza games and thinks that if Kiryu can do it, so can he. quote:Largo took a pace forward and then another. Bond crouched, backing carefully, so as not to cut his rubber skin, into the narrow passage. Largo came on, slowly, deliberately. In two more paces he would attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooy4VtKCVNo The fight scene in the movie is considerably less embarrassing for Bond (who was just rendered feeble by an octopus in his face), but still ends with Domino saving him only because Largo needlessly spends several seconds staring and grinning at Bond instead of pulling the trigger. quote:Bond got slowly to his feet. He took a step forward. Suddenly he felt his knees beginning to give. A wave of blackness began to creep up over his vision. He leant against the coral, his mouth slackening round the oxygen tube. Water seeped into his mouth. No! he said to himself. No! Don’t let that happen!
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Aug 26, 2019 17:58
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chitoryu12 posted:
Plus it was appears it was a four on one rather than a one on one.
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Aug 27, 2019 01:35
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to be far, an octopus latching onto your face is a legitimate danger for divers as those suckers are strong and could cause them to suffocate.
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Aug 27, 2019 02:04
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Robindaybird posted:to be far, an octopus latching onto your face is a legitimate danger for divers as those suckers are strong and could cause them to suffocate. And Bond has now had a couple run-ins with rather unfriendly cephalopods, starting all the way back with Dr. No's lair! Thunderball is perhaps the Bond film closest to my heart, for a couple reasons. I did my master's research on marine ecology in the Florida Keys, so the descriptions of diving with the local wildlife are a nice touch of "hey, I know that!" Admittedly, I call coral heads... coral heads, and not Fleming's terminology. The film is fun, because that underwater fight scene has a fun connection to marine biology. The real star is, of course, this majestic beast:  That's a Caribbean spiny lobster, Panulirus argus, looking mightily confused as weird bubble-blowing monsters thrash about his habitat. These delicious animals do a lot of really remarkable things, but might be best known for their conga line-like synchronized migrations to deeper water to avoid the turbulence associated with storms. This was highlighted by Jacques Cousteau's television series in the episode "The Incredible March of the Spiny Lobsters." In the episode, Cousteau, who apparently likes to conduct interviews wearing only a hat, talks to the guy who did the work to describe this migration:  That guy is Dr. Bill Herrnkind, who is my academic grandfather on the master's side (he was my master's advisor's Ph.D advisor), and was also one of the divers for the climactic fight scene in Thunderball. He was working on his doctorate studying lobsters in the Bahamas when the film was being shot, and there were apparently so few scuba-qualified people available at the time that they basically rounded up every diver who could be found as extras. One summer while I was down working in the Keys, he came down to visit us and was gracious enough to watch his star cinematic turn with us one night. He said he couldn't find which one was him, but I believe he said they basically ended up getting assigned sides based on whether they had a beard or not (so he may have been SPECTRE's representative from the Amish?).
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Aug 27, 2019 03:25
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Timmy Age 6 posted:And Bond has now had a couple run-ins with rather unfriendly cephalopods, starting all the way back with Dr. No's lair! So this is why you like Lobster's so much.
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Aug 27, 2019 03:59
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Timmy Age 6 posted:And Bond has now had a couple run-ins with rather unfriendly cephalopods, starting all the way back with Dr. No's lair! I can never say enough how much I love this thread.
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Aug 27, 2019 04:31
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I haven’t seen Thunderball since I was a kid, but goddamn that underwater fight was even bigger than I remembered. I can’t imagine what a clusterfuck that was to shoot - imagine cutting fake air tubes with a real knife underwater and a ton of people fake fighting around you. The gag with the two people stopping the fight because of the shark was beat-for-beat PERFECT. Also movie Bond bad spy, he should have been grounding the Disco Volante, not steering around obstacles.
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Aug 27, 2019 05:21
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Remulak posted:I haven’t seen Thunderball since I was a kid, but goddamn that underwater fight was even bigger than I remembered. I can’t imagine what a clusterfuck that was to shoot - imagine cutting fake air tubes with a real knife underwater and a ton of people fake fighting around you. Considering the amount of bubbles coming from those, there's no guarantee they were even fake! Ricou Brown brought in his own team of stunt divers to do the sequence and had virtually unlimited creative freedom in choreographing it. The knives and spear guns were real and simply used carefully to avoid actually hitting anyone. As you can tell from how clear and bright everything is, they filmed only a short distance below the surface; they would rehearse a particular shot on a rented barge on the water before diving in to film.
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Aug 27, 2019 13:49
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This should have been posted when we were talking about Dr. No, but, its still kind of cool. And my thanks to Daniel Immelwahr whose "How to Hide an Empire" points it out. So, obviously, one of the major influences on the character of Dr. No is Fu Manchu, but there might be another one.  This is Axel Wenner-Gren. "Doctor" Wenner-Gren (He had gotten an honorary doctorate at a university in Peru and made people call him that) was a Swedish entrepreneur who basically made a fortune selling vacuum cleaners, being one of the first people to realize you could sell them for home use. He worked his way up to take over the company Electrolux, branched out into other things, including newspapers, banks, armsmakers, and some very profitable deals with the presidents of Mexico and Peru, and by the early 30s was one of the richest men in the world. He, at that point, bought an island in the Bahamas, (Hog Island, now called Paradise Island and home of the Atlantis resort), and moved there as a way to get around Swedish taxes. In 1939, Wenner-Gren, concerned about the international situation, decided he would do something about it. He was friends with Hermann Goering , whose first wife had been a Swedish countess, and he tried to use those connections to arrange a meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler so they could work something out. It didn't work. Jump ahead to 1943, Kingston, where there's a joint Anglo-American naval conference going on. One of the attendees is Rear Admiral John Godfrey, director of Naval Intelligence, who brings his aide, a certain Ian Fleming. This is Fleming's first trip to Jamaica, and he falls in love with the place. The British and Americans talk about a lot, but one of those things is Wenner-Gren. There's suspicious that he might be a German agent. It's a lot of things...his friendship with Goering, his closeness with the Duke of Windsor, who's suspected of having German sympathies himself, hints that his Bank, the Bank of the Bahamas is being used to launder money for the Germans,and the fact that when the Britiah passenger liner the Athena was sunk by a German sub at the beginning of the war, Wenner-Gren's yacht, the Southern Cross, was the first civilian ship on the scene to help rescue the survivors. There's another, even darker rumor, which is that his island hides a secret U-Boat base. They arent able to find proof of that, but the suspicion is enough. His companies and properties on the Bahamas are siezed, he's put on an American blacklist, and he goes to Mexico, where he lives for the rest of the war. So, millionaire with a secret base on a private island who is secretly plotting evil schemes? Hmm. No relation?
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Aug 27, 2019 14:04
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chitoryu12 posted:The scene was filmed at Clifton Pier off Nassau and coordinated by Ricou Browning, who played the Gill-Man in The Creature from the Black Lagoon during the underwater sequences and is currently the only surviving Universal Classic Monster actor. I know what you mean, but your choice of the phrase "currently the only" rather than something like "the last" conveys the odd implication that this may change in the future in some way other than his demise. "Currently the only surviving Universal Classic Monster actor, at least until the resurrection of Bela Lugosi comes around in 2108."
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Aug 27, 2019 15:11
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The_White_Crane posted:I know what you mean, but your choice of the phrase "currently the only" rather than something like "the last" conveys the odd implication that this may change in the future in some way other than his demise. Given the genre, you have to keep the option open.
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Aug 27, 2019 15:49
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Chapter 24: 'Take it easy, Mr. Bond'quote:Felix Leiter came into the white, antiseptic room and closed the door conspiratorially behind him. He came and stood beside the bed where Bond lay on the edge of drugged sleep. ‘How’s it going, feller?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GMmp8mEknc The ending to the film shows some technology fans of Metal Gear Solid will be familiar with: the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system. After hooking himself and Domino to a harness, Bond releases a balloon that an aircraft flies into to hoist them into the air. This was an extremely new system, having first been used in Project COLDFEET in 1962 to pick up a pair of CIA agents investigating an abandoned Soviet research station on the drifting Arctic sea ice. US Air Force Lt. Charles Russhon had been serving as a technical adviser after the war and had a good working relationship with Eon, negotiating the filming rights for them in Istanbul and Fort Knox in the previous two films. When it came time to film Thunderball, he used his connections to get them a working Fulton system to use. He also acquired some experimental rocket fuel for them to use in the Disco Volante crash after Largo is killed; you can watch the rest of the clip if you want to see how the film version splits in half to let Largo escape, though it's not in English. John Stears was unfamiliar with the fuel used for the explosion and ended up using far too much, blowing out windows 30 miles away in Nassau. At least he won an Academy Award! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRNk9l7nR6w&t=264s quote:‘Well, I’ll make it quick. Doctor’s just doing his rounds and I’ll get hell if he finds me here. They’ve recovered both bombs, and Kotze – the physicist chap – is singing like a bird. Seems SPECTRE’S a bunch of really big-time hoodlums – ex-operators of SMERSH, the Mafia, the Gestapo – all the big outfits. Headquarters in Paris. Top man’s called Blofeld, but the bastard got away – or anyway they haven’t caught up with him yet, according to C.I.A. Probably Largo’s radio silence warned him. Must be quite a Mister Genius. Kotze says SPECTRE’s banked millions of dollars since they got going five or six years ago. This job was going to be the final haul. We were right about Miami. It was going to be Target No. 2. Same sort of operation. They were going to plant the second bomb in the yacht basin.’ Bond calls after Felix, but he's already gone. He wants to know how Domino is doing. quote:Dr Stengel, the fashionable doctor of Nassau, was not only fashionable but a good doctor. He was one of the Jewish refugee doctors who, but for Hitler, would have been looking after some big hospital in a town the size of Düsseldorf. Instead, rich and grateful patients had built a modern clinic for him in Nassau where he treated the natives for shillings and the millionaires and their wives for ten guineas a visit. He was more used to handling overdoses of sleeping pills and the ailments of the rich and old than multiple abrasions, curare poisoning and odd wounds that looked more as if they belonged to the days of the pirates. But these were Government orders, and under the Official Secrets Act at that. Dr Stengel hadn’t asked any questions about his patients, nor about the sixteen autopsies he had had to perform, six for Americans from the big submarine, and ten, including the corpse of the owner, from the fine yacht that had been in harbour for so long. Obviously, there's a lot of controversy over how Fleming handled Jewish characters. Relatively few Jews have been confirmed in the canon, but several villains like Goldfinger and Le Chiffre were suggested to have Jewish blood somewhere in them. Blofeld is baptized, but the description of his ears as having large lobes is a stereotypically Jewish trait that gets named in Goldfinger as well. Stengel is one of the only characters to not only be confirmed as Jewish by Fleming, but to be portrayed positively. However, the issue of racism and Antisemitism in the 1940s and 1950s is always one that has to be looked at with an eye other than our modern perspective. Fleming was close friends with Jews in his life, from Morris Cargill (a columnist for the Daily Gleaner) to his mistress Blanche Blackwell. He was a customer of Welsh Jewish jeweller Morris Wartski. Harry Saltzman was Jewish. Richard Maibaum, who worked on the screenplay of almost every Bond film until his death in 1991, was Jewish. If Fleming was Antisemitic, he certainly had no problem spending as much time around (and inside) Jews as possible. Fleming's upbringing was one of every people having distinct traits. He showed a preference for the British of course, but Fleming stereotyped down to individual nationalities. Some got it worse than others, but everyone got it. It's not the kind of racism that you see today, where your skin color or Jewish background is all that's needed to decide that you need to be genocided. In some ways it transcended the modern idea of "racism" in the first place, without a basis in hatred. It was simply the way humans worked as far as they were concerned. quote:Now he said carefully, ‘Miss Vitali will be all right. For the moment she is suffering from shock. She needs rest.’ Nobody is intimidated by James Bond. quote:Doctor Stengel said patiently, kindly, ‘Someone has ill-treated her. She is suffering from burns – many burns. She is still in great pain. But,’ he waved a reassuring hand, ‘inside she is well. She is in the next room, in No. 4. You may see her, but only for a minute. Then she will sleep. And so will you. Yes?’ He held open the door. Just keep in mind how much of a badass Domino is. She's not a trained spy, soldier, or criminal. She's an actress and socialite of no particularly special background. Not only did she undergo torture without breaking even once, as soon as she was alone she broke out, stole a speargun, and dove off a yacht to go kill the man who tortured her. quote:‘Thank you. Thank you, Doctor.’ Bond walked out of the room with faltering steps. His blasted legs were beginning to give again. The doctor watched him go to the door of No. 4, watched him open it and close it again behind him with the exaggerated care of a drunken man. The doctor went off along the corridor thinking: it won’t do him any harm and it may do her some good. It is what she needs – some tenderness. Another book comes to a close, with Bond passed out on the floor snoring in a hospital. It really is an Archer episode, isn't it? Our next book is probably the oddest: The Spy Who Loved Me, the only book written in first person...from another character's point of view?
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Aug 27, 2019 16:33
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From a woman's too. I remember quite liking it.
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Aug 27, 2019 21:41
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 The Spy Who Loved Me is one of the most unusual, controversial novels in the Bond canon. Not necessarily for its content (though it's more sexually charged than the others), but because it's barely about Bond at all. At this point in his life, Fleming is collapsing. He's no longer healthy enough to go skiing at Christmas after a coronary put him in a clinic for a month. His relationship with his wife is further fracturing as they both cheat on each other and her friends (including author Evelyn Waugh) mock his cheap thrillers behind his back. And while he had finally gotten Bond optioned for a serious film and work was being done on the first film adaptation with Eon Productions, the books were having some issues that went farther than his lawsuit with Kevin McClory. As this thread has emphasized, Fleming did not necessarily consider Bond a hero you wanted to emulate. The books are pulpy fun with a hero who's an alcoholic dumbass thug, not the suave sophisticate that the movies would turn him into. But he was noticing that his adult thrillers were increasingly being read by a young audience, and they actually wanted to emulate Bond! Lacking the context and maturity to understand Bond's flaws and inner monologue, they saw him as a two-fisted hero who got to bed beautiful girls and eat and drink exotic cuisine in between killing evil villains. To try and dissuade his young readers from this line of thought, Fleming wrote what he called a "cautionary tale" that would showcase Bond from a more realistic outside perspective. It, uh, didn't go as planned. While the book does bounce between a few foreign locales, most of it takes place at a sleepy motel in the Adirondacks and the villains are the two-bit thugs Bond thought he was dealing with when he infiltrated the Spangled Mob. Bond himself doesn't appear until halfway through the story, with our time focused instead on Vivienne Michel essentially giving her autobiography. It lacks virtually all of the typical tropes and scenes of what we've come to expect as "a Bond novel," instead falling under the "kitchen sink realism" genre of a regular woman living a regular life. The reviews, suffice to say, were savage. The Spy Who Loved Me received possibly the worst reception of any work Ian Fleming ever released. Whether it was tampering with the formula right when the first trailers for Dr. No were coming out or being too sexual (which got it banned in a few countries, as this was years before the Women's Liberation movement would make such books common), the book was roundly hated. Fleming was mortified and ashamed of his failure, refusing to allow the book to be reprinted or turned into a movie. In hindsight, however, the book has been viewed through a different lens. Retrospectively, our generation has a far different view of women like Vivienne Michel. She's by far the most developed female character of any that Fleming created, one who makes mistakes and does things that seem to only make sense to her if you're a typical 1950s man who doesn't understand women as human beings. While some modern reviewers view the book as cliche or continue to believe that Fleming hates women and interpret everything he writes through that lens, others have come to appreciate Viv's complexity and the almost anti-Bond perspective brought to it. We'll get a chance to decide for ourselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7xLnfubFY When Fleming gave the film rights for his books to Eon, he only gave permission to use the title of this book. An entirely original story had to be crafted, which was rife with problems. Harry Saltzman, longtime partner with Cubby Broccoli, was suffering from clinical depression and financial problems after taking out a loan that forced him to sell off his stocks in Technicolor (which he had won control of in 1970) to pay back, which he accused of being a conspiracy by the other board members to oust him. As his wife slowly died of terminal cancer, Saltzman's dubious financial decisions led to him selling his 50% share in the franchise for £20 million. He would retire from the film industry after his wife's death, never again having anything to do with the Bond industry, before dying of a heart attack in 1994. Securing a director and writer was equally difficult. Even Steven Spielberg was approached, but Jaws hadn't released yet so they decided against him in a move they're still probably kicking themselves beyond the grave for. They eventually settled on Lewis Gilbert, the director for You Only Live Twice. Kevin McClory filed an injunction to prevent them from using Blofeld again, resulting in numerous script rewrites. Filming saw the construction of the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios, a gigantic 45,424 square foot studio for filming scenes involving the villains' submarine-capturing tanker. The set was so massive that Stanley Kubrick was brought in secret to advise them on how to light it. Despite all of the problems they faced, The Spy Who Loved Me was a massive success. The story about a hot female KGB spy falling in love with Bond on a mission was just what everyone expected in 1977 and it's widely regarded as one of the best Bond films; Roger Moore considered it his personal favorite appearance. It also led to the creation of Jaws, one of film's most iconic henchmen. The song, "Nobody Does it Better", was the first Bond theme to have a different title than the movie. It was composed by Marvin Hamlisch (one of only two people along with Richard Rodgers to have a Pulitzer, Emmy, Tony, Grammy, and Oscar, most famous for composing A Chorus Line) and sung by Carly Simon, one of the many hit 70s and 80s artists who's part of the Grammy Hall of Fame but whose music has mostly disappeared from the public eye when someone isn't putting on a decade-oriented playlist or making a "You're So Vain" joke. As with many other artists, her Bond theme was her biggest hit, spending 3 weeks at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the second Bond theme to be nominated for an Academy Award, though Bond wouldn't win until 2013. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Aug 28, 2019 |
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Aug 28, 2019 14:44
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Chapter 1: Scaredy Catquote:I was running away. I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from drabness, fustiness, snobbery, the claustrophobia of close horizons and from my inability, although I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race. In fact, I was running away from almost everything except the law. It's instantly apparent that this isn't your typical Bond book, and Viv definitely doesn't speak or think like Bond. quote:Station WOKO (they might have dreamed up a grander call-sign!) in Albany, the capital of New York State and about fifty miles due south of where I was, announced that it was six o’clock. The weather report that followed included a storm warning with gale-force winds. The storm was moving down from the north and would hit Albany around eight p.m. That meant that I would be having a noisy night. I didn’t mind. Storms don’t frighten me, and although the nearest living soul, as far as I knew, was ten miles away up the not very good secondary road to Lake George, the thought of the pines that would soon be thrashing outside, the thunder and lightning and rain, made me already feel snug and warm and protected in anticipation. And alone! But above all alone! ‘Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.’ Where had I read that? Who had written it? It was so exactly the way I felt, the way that, as a child, I had always felt until I had forced myself to ‘get into the swim’, ‘be one of the crowd’–a good sort, on the ball, hep. And what a hash I had made of ‘togetherness’! I shrugged the memory of failure away. Everyone doesn’t have to live in a heap. Painters, writers, musicians are lonely people. So are statesmen and admirals and generals. But then, I added to be fair, so are criminals and lunatics. Let’s just say, not to be too flattering, that true individuals are lonely. It’s not a virtue, the reverse if anything. One ought to share and communicate if one is to be a useful member of the tribe. The fact that I was so much happier when I was alone was surely the sign of a faulty, a neurotic character. I had said this so often to myself in the past five years that now, that evening, I just shrugged my shoulders and, hugging my solitude to me, walked across the big lobby to the door and went out to have a last look at the evening. Bond's enemy is the octopus. Viv's enemy is the pine tree. quote:Five acres or so of these stupid trees had been cleared to build the motel, which is all that this place really was. ‘Motel’ isn’t a good word any longer. It has become smart to use ‘Motor Court’ or ‘Ranch Cabins’ ever since motels became associated with prostitution, gangsters and murders, for all of which their anonymity and lack of supervision is a convenience. The site, tourist-wise, in the lingo of the trade, was a good one. There was this wandering secondary road through the forest, which was a pleasant alternative route between Lake George and Glens Falls to the south, and halfway along it was a small lake, cutely called Dreamy Waters, that is a traditional favourite with picnickers. It was on the southern shore of this lake that the motel had been built, its reception lobby facing the road with, behind this main building, the rooms fanning out in a semicircle. There were forty rooms with kitchen, shower and lavatory, and they all had some kind of a view of the lake behind them. The whole construction and design was the latest thing–glazed pitch-pine frontages and pretty timber roofs all over knobbles, air-conditioning, television in every cabin, children’s playground, swimming pool, golf range out over the lake with floating balls (fifty balls, one dollar)–all the gimmicks. Food? Cafeteria in the lobby, and grocery and liquor deliveries twice a day from Lake George. All this for ten dollars single and sixteen double. No wonder that, with around two hundred thousand dollars’ capital outlay and a season lasting only from July the first to the beginning of October, or, so far as the no vacancy sign was concerned, from July fourteenth to Labour Day, the owners were finding the going hard. Or so those dreadful Phanceys had told me when they’d taken me on as receptionist for only thirty dollars a week plus keep. Thank heavens they were out of my hair! Song in my heart? There had been the whole heavenly choir at six o’clock that morning when their shiny station-wagon had disappeared down the road on their way to Glens Falls and then to Troy where the monsters came from. Mr Phancey had made a last grab at me and I hadn’t been quick enough. His free hand had run like a fast lizard over my body before I had crunched my heel into his instep. He had let go then. When his contorted face had cleared, he said softly, ‘All right, sex-box. Just see that you mind camp good until the boss comes to take over the keys tomorrow midday. Happy dreams tonight.’ Then he had grinned a grin I hadn’t understood, and had gone over to the station-wagon where his wife had been watching from the driver’s seat. ‘Come on, Jed,’ she had said sharply. ‘You can work off those urges on West Street tonight.’ She put the car in gear and called over to me sweetly, ‘’Bye now, cutie-pie. Write us every day.’ Then she had wiped the crooked smile off her face and I caught a last glimpse of her withered, hatchet profile as the car turned out on to the road. Phew! What a couple! Right out of a book–and what a book! Dear Diary! Well, people couldn’t come much worse, and now they’d gone. From now on, on my travels, the human race must improve! Contrary to Viv's hatred of the area, Fleming's accounts were that he actually greatly enjoyed Lake George and staying in the motels in the mountains. I can imagine he didn't suffer nearly as much sexual harassment from the owners, though. The Dreamy Pines Motor Court was based on a motel that Fleming often passed when he was driving to see Ivar Bryce at Black Hollow Farm. Its location puts it right where the Lake Luzerne Motel is at 296 Lake Avenue, though it's unclear how old this motel is and I can't confirm that it's the motel. Frieda Toth, a New York City librarian who writes articles for Literary 007, has been studying the area and trying to find more information on Fleming's time there.  quote:I had been standing there, looking down the way the Phanceys had gone, remembering them. Now I turned and looked to the north to see after the weather. It had been a beautiful day, Swiss clear and hot for the middle of October, but now high fretful clouds, black with jagged pink hair from the setting sun, were piling down the sky. Fast little winds were zigzagging among the forest tops and every now and then they hit the single yellow light above the deserted gas station down the road at the tail of the lake and set it swaying. When a longer gust reached me, cold and buffeting, it brought with it the whisper of a metallic squeak from the dancing light, and the first time this happened I shivered deliciously at the little ghostly noise. On the lake shore, beyond the last of the cabins, small waves were lapping fast against the stones and the gun-metal surface of the lake was fretted with sudden catspaws that sometimes showed a fleck of white. But, in between the angry gusts, the air was still, and the sentinel trees across the road and behind the motel seemed to be pressing silently closer to huddle round the campfire of the brightly-lit building at my back. Yeah, when I said this book was more sexed up I meant it. Vivienne Michel is a female protagonist the likes of which would be rare until the late 60s. quote:It was getting dark. Tonight there would be no evening chorus from the birds. They had long ago read the signs and disappeared into their own shelters in the forest, as had the animals–the squirrels and the chipmunks and the deer. In all this huge, wild area there was now only me out in the open. I took a last few deep breaths of the soft, moist air. The humidity had strengthened the scent of pine and moss, and now there was also a strong underlying armpit smell of earth. It was almost as if the forest was sweating with the same pleasurable excitement I was feeling. Somewhere, from quite close, a nervous owl asked loudly ‘Who?’ and then was silent. I took a few steps away from the lighted doorway and stood in the middle of the dusty road, looking north. A strong gust of wind hit me and blew back my hair. Lightning threw a quick blue-white hand across the horizon. Seconds later, thunder growled softly like a wakening guard dog, and then the big wind came and the tops of the trees began to dance and thrash and the yellow light over the gas station jigged and blinked down the road as if to warn me. It was warning me. Suddenly the dancing light was blurred with rain, its luminosity fogged by an advancing grey sheet of water. The first heavy drops hit me, and I turned and ran. Viv barely makes it inside before the massive downpour hits, accompanied by a nearby lightning strike that shakes the whole building. quote:I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I stood and cringed, my hands over my ears. I hadn’t meant it to be like this! The silence, that had been deafening, resolved itself back into the roar of the rain, the roar that had been so comforting but that now said, ‘You hadn’t thought it could be so bad. You had never seen a storm in these mountains. Pretty flimsy this little shelter of yours, really. How’d you like to have the lights put out as a start? Then the crash of a thunderbolt through that matchwood ceiling of yours? Then, just to finish you off, lightning to set fire to the place–perhaps electrocute you? Or shall we just frighten you so much that you dash out in the rain and try and make those ten miles to Lake George. Like to be alone do you? Well, just try this for size!’ Again the room turned blue-white, again, just overhead, there came the ear-splitting crack of the explosion, but this time the crack widened and racketed to and fro in a furious cannonade that set the cups and glasses rattling behind the bar and made the woodwork creak with the pressure of the sound-waves.
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Aug 29, 2019 14:57
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chitoryu12 posted:In fact, I was running away from almost everything except the law. drat that line hit close to home.
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Aug 29, 2019 16:29
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I am really liking this so far, you can see him enjoying having a more interesting character to live in.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:09
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sebmojo posted:I am really liking this so far, you can see him enjoying having a decent human being to live in.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:13
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sebmojo posted:I am really liking this so far, you can see him enjoying having a more interesting character to live in. It also finally lets him have a character with different opinions! Fleming greatly enjoyed his trips to the Adirondacks, but Viv hates it. Something many people have noticed with this book is that contemporary reviews are sharply divided along gender. Female reviewers loved Vivienne Michel, but male reviewers found her confounding and impossible to understand. I even saw one recent review that criticizes the book for "plot holes" because he can't understand why she wouldn't make perfectly logical decisions regarding her romantic partners! "Why would this smart girl go driving across America after having a string of bad relationships? Doesn't she know it's dangerous! How did Fleming ever miss this?"
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Aug 29, 2019 21:36
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I love this book; it's like auto-fanfic. Fleming writing as a hot girl who gets to gently caress James Bond. It's amazing and hilarious.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:48
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Runcible Cat posted:I love this book; it's like auto-fanfic. Fleming writing as a hot girl who gets to gently caress James Bond. It's amazing and hilarious. When we get to see Bond from someone else's perspective, it's...not the most flattering depiction.
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Aug 29, 2019 23:15
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"Sex-box" also strikes me as a ... rather unlikely insult.
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Aug 29, 2019 23:43
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chitoryu12 posted:It also finally lets him have a character with different opinions! Fleming greatly enjoyed his trips to the Adirondacks, but Viv hates it. I guess those reviewers never experienced a self imposed journey, lol. The recent review is baffling though, it’s pretty common for people to go on long trips so they can get away from their day to day lives in tyool 2019.
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Aug 30, 2019 00:31
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HIJK posted:I guess those reviewers never experienced a self Basically she's taking a journey from Canada to Florida and is stopping here for work and shelter on the way. He finds this terribly irresponsible! No intelligent girl would ever do that! Plot hole!
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Aug 30, 2019 01:21
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Selachian posted:"Sex-box" also strikes me as a ... rather unlikely insult. I suspect it's to replace a much more vulgar insult that wouldn't been publishable in the era.
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Aug 30, 2019 02:07
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Chapter 2: Dear Dead Daysquote:When I came to, I at once knew where I was and what had happened and I cringed closer to the floor, waiting to be hit again. I stayed like that for about ten minutes, listening to the roar of the rain, wondering if the electric shock had done me permanent damage, burned me, inside perhaps, making me unable to have babies, or turned my hair white. Perhaps all my hair had been burned off! I moved a hand to it. It felt all right, though there was a bump at the back of my head. Gingerly I moved. Nothing was broken. There was no harm. And then the big General Electric icebox in the corner burst into life and began its cheerful, domestic throbbing and I realized that the world was still going on and that the thunder had gone away and I got rather weakly to my feet and looked about me, expecting I don’t know what scene of chaos and destruction. But there it all was, just as I had ‘left’ it – the important-looking reception desk, the wire rack of paperbacks and magazines, the long counter of the cafeteria, the dozen neat tables with rainbow-hued plastic tops and uncomfortable little metal chairs, the big ice-water container and the gleaming coffee percolator – everything in its place, just as ordinary as could be. There was only the hole in the window and a spreading pool of water on the floor as evidence of the holocaust through which this room and I had just passed. Holocaust? What was I talking about? The only holocaust had been in my head! There was a storm. There had been thunder and lightning. I had been terrified, like a child, by the big bangs. Like an idiot I had taken hold of the electric switch – not even waiting for the pause between lightning flashes, but choosing just the moment when another flash was due. It had knocked me out. I had been punished with a bump on the head. Served me right, stupid, ignorant scaredy cat! But wait a minute! Perhaps my hair had turned white! I walked, rather fast, across the room, picked up my bag from the desk and went behind the bar of the cafeteria and bent down and looked into the long piece of mirror below the shelves. I looked first inquiringly into my eyes. They gazed back at me, blue, clear, but wide with surmise. The lashes were there and the eyebrows, brown, an expanse of inquiring forehead and then, yes, the sharp, brown peak and the tumble of perfectly ordinary very dark brown hair curving away to right and left in two big waves. So! I took out my comb and ran it brusquely, angrily through my hair, put the comb back in my bag and snapped the clasp.  Because we obviously can't talk about the actress who played Vivienne Michel, we'll talk about her replacement in the film: Major Anya Amasova, AKA Agent Triple X.  Because the film uses only the title, "the spy who loved me" can refer to both Bond and his unlikely ally. When megalomaniac Karl Stromberg plans to use his giant hollow tanker ship to steal nuclear submarines and destroy the world and establish an underwater civilization, the KGB and MI6 reluctantly declare a truce and force their best agents to team up to stop him. The only downside is that Bond happened to incidentally kill Amasova's boyfriend during an assassination attempt, leading to her vowing to kill him when the mission is complete. Of course, Roger Moore's penis is too powerful for that in the end. Amasova was played by Barbara Bach, a half-Jewish native of Queens. She became a professional model straight out of high school and quickly became one of the top American models of the 1960s, which led into a hefty career acting in Italian giallos and other cheap European films. Her greater image after The Spy Who Loved Me helped get her some English-language roles, but she hasn't acted since a cameo in 1987. She still maintains some connections to fame: she's been married to Ringo Starr since 1981 and her sister Marjorie is married to Joe Walsh of the Eagles! quote:My watch said it was nearly seven o’clock. I switched on the radio, and while I listened to WOKO frightening its audience about the storm – power lines down, the Hudson River rising dangerously at Glens Falls, a fallen elm blocking Route 9 at Saratoga Springs, flood warning at Mechanicville – I strapped a bit of cardboard over the broken window-pane with Scotch tape and got a cloth and bucket and mopped up the pool of water on the floor. Then I ran across the short covered way to the cabins out back and went into mine, Number 9 on the right-hand side towards the lake, and took off my clothes and had a cold shower. My white Terylene shirt was smudged from my fall and I washed it and hung it up to dry. Terylene is a British brand name for a synthetic fiber made from PET plastic by DuPont, commonly called Dacron in the United States. DuPont debuted the first Dacron suits in 1951, a predecessor to the infamous polyester leisure suits of the 1970s. quote:I had already forgotten my chastisement by the storm and the fact that I had behaved like a silly goose, and my heart was singing again with the prospect of my solitary evening and of being on my way the next day. On an impulse, I put on the best I had in my tiny wardrobe – my black velvet toreador pants with the rather indecent gold zip down the seat, itself most unchastely tight, and, not bothering with a bra, my golden thread Camelot sweater with the wide floppy turtleneck. I admired myself in the mirror, decided to pull my sleeves up above the elbows, slipped my feet into my gold Ferragamo sandals, and did the quick dash back to the lobby. There was just one good drink left in the quart of Virginia Gentleman bourbon that had already lasted me two weeks, and I filled one of the best cut-glass tumblers with ice cubes and poured the bourbon over them, shaking the bottle to get out the last drop. Then I pulled the most comfortable armchair over from the reception side of the room to stand beside the radio, turned the radio up, lit a Parliament from the last five in my box, took a stiff pull at my drink, and curled myself into the armchair. Bourbon and cigarettes? No wonder Bond will like her! And those Ferragamo sandals are not cheap; their current run starts around $500+.  Virginia Gentleman is a bourbon which had a label at the time that could charitably be described as "insensitive." It was classier then, but now it's a bottom shelf, plastic bottle brand made since 2003 by redistilling Buffalo Trace in Fredericksburg. quote:The commercial, all about cats and how they loved Pussyfoot Prime Liver Meal, lilted on against the steady roar of the rain, whose tone only altered when a particularly heavy gust of wind hurled the water like grapeshot at the windows and softly shook the building. Inside, it was just as I had visualized – weatherproof, cosy and gay and glittering with lights and chromium. WOKO announced forty minutes of ‘Music To Kiss By’ and suddenly there were the Ink Spots singing ‘Someone’s Rockin’ my Dream Boat’ and I was back on the River Thames and it was five summers ago and we were drifting down past Kings Eyot in a punt and there was Windsor Castle in the distance and Derek was paddling while I worked the portable. We only had ten records, but whenever it came to be the turn of the Ink Spots’ L.P. and the record got to ‘Dream Boat’, Derek would always plead, ‘Play it again, Viv,’ and I would have to go down on my knees and find the place with the needle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QhP8kGt3JY The soundtrack to Fleming's Bond is less "James Bond" and more "Fallout." quote:So now my eyes filled with tears – not because of Derek, but because of the sweet pain of boy and girl and sunshine and first love with its tunes and snapshots and letters ‘Sealed With A Loving Kiss’. They were tears of sentiment for lost childhood, and of self-pity for the pain that had been its winding sheet, and I let two tears roll down my cheeks before I brushed them away and decided to have a short orgy of remembering.  If only the nuns could see her now! The Ursulines (patron saint being St. Ursula) were the first Catholic nuns to arrive in the North America in 1639; they were beaten to the New World by Spanish Hieronymites in 1585 in Mexico City. Their emphasis is services to the poor and needy, especially education for girls, so they operate or work at dozens of schools and colleges around the world. quote:The true sons and daughters of Quebec form a society, almost a secret society, that must be as powerful as the Calvinist clique of Geneva, and the initiates refer to themselves proudly, male or female, as ‘Canadiennes’. Lower, much lower, down the scale come the ‘Canadiens’ – Protestant Canadians. Then ‘Les Anglais’, which embraces all more or less recent immigrants from Britain, and lastly, ‘Les Américains’, a term of contempt. The Canadiennes pride themselves on their spoken French, although it is a bastard patois full of two-hundred-year-old words which Frenchmen themselves don’t understand and is larded with Frenchified English words – rather, I suppose, like the relationship of Afrikaans to the language of the Dutch. The snobbery and exclusiveness of this Quebec clique extend even towards the French who live in France. These mother-people to the Canadiennes are referred to simply as ‘Étrangers’! I have told all this at some length to explain that the defection from The Faith of a Michel from Sainte Famille was almost as heinous a crime as a defection, if that were possible, from the Mafia in Sicily, and it was made pretty plain to me that, in leaving the Ursulines and Quebec, I had just about burned my bridges so far as my spiritual guardians and my home town were concerned. Québécois, as Viv says, is basically abandoned French. The isolation from France under British rule prevented the French spoken in Quebec from evolving with the Old World, leaving a lot of archaic pronunciations and words behind. As they never developed the words proper French did for the evolving modern world and technology, loanwords from various languages (especially English and Irish) filled in the gaps. It has no standardization the way regular French does and freely evolves over time and turns into regional dialects, whereas France has established the Académie Française to painstakingly craft French words and phrases to keep up with the times while maintaining a snooty level of Frenchness. quote:My aunt sensibly pooh-poohed my nerves over the social ostracism that followed – most of my friends were forbidden to have anything to do with me – but the fact remains that I arrived in England loaded with a sense of guilt and ‘difference’ that, added to my ‘colonialism’, were dreadful psychological burdens with which to face a smart finishing school for young ladies. I get the feeling this isn't unlike Fleming's time in Eton. He was apparently bullied pretty badly, and is rumored to have been raped by another boy there. quote:It was the holidays that made up for everything. I made friends with a Scottish girl, Susan Duff, who liked the same open-air things as I did. She too was an only child and her parents were glad to have me to keep her company. So there was Scotland in the summer and ski-ing in the winter and spring – all over Europe, in Switzerland, Austria, Italy – and we stuck to each other through the finishing school and at the end we even ‘came out’ together and Aunt Florence produced five hundred pounds as my contribution to an idiotic joint dance at the Hyde Park Hotel, and I got on the same ‘list’ and went the rounds of similar idiotic dances at which the young men seemed to me rude and spotty and totally unmasculine compared with the young Canadians I had known. (But I may have been wrong because one of the spottiest of them rode in the Grand National that year and finished the course!) The Grand National is the biggest horse race in Britain and one of the most famous in the world. It's a two-lap steeplechase with a total length of over 4 miles, with horses jumping 30 hurdles in total. Even finishing is difficult, as horses trip over hurdles or refuse to make jumps. The fences are varying heights and feature water obstacles or drops on the opposite side to further trip up horses. Amazingly, they've only had one death in 1862 and they claim the rider was already deathly ill anyway. One of the most infamous races was in 1967. A horse that lost its rider at the first fence continued running of its own accord, slamming into another horse at the 23rd jump. In the ensuing pile-up, only John Buckingham riding Foinavon managed to dodge around it and win with 100:1 odds. The surprise upset led to the fence being named after Foinavon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tls18p0AYjM quote:And then I met Derek. Elvas plums are the famous "sugar plum fairies dancing in your head" sweets. You pick green plums, cook them, and soak them in sugar for 6 weeks until they're fully infused with tooth-busting sweetness. quote:The party was a great success, almost too much of a success. All the thirty came and some of them brought others and there was a real squash with people sitting on the stairs and even one man on the loo with a girl on his lap. The noise and the heat were terrific. Perhaps after all we weren’t such squares as we had thought, or perhaps people really like squares so long as they are true squares and don’t pretend. Anyway of course the worst happened and we ran out of drink! I was standing by the table when some wag drained the last bottle of champagne and shouted in a strangled voice, ‘Water! Water! Or we’ll never see England again.’ I got fussed and said stupidly, ‘Well, there just isn’t any more,’ when a tall young man standing against the wall said, ‘Of course there is. You’ve forgotten the cellar,’ and he took me by the elbow and shoved me out of the room and down the stairs. ‘Come on,’ he said firmly. ‘Can’t spoil a good party. We’ll get some more from the pub.’ It's hard to imagine how controversial this book was back then, but Britain was pretty stuffy and conservative compared to the US and even we were still stuck in the 50s in a lot of ways in 1961. You just didn't write popular mass market books about how teenagers get drunk and have sex in the bathroom at a wild party. quote:Well, we went to the pub and got two bottles of gin and an armful of bitter lemon and he insisted on paying for the gin so I paid for the lemon. He was rather tight in a pleasant way and explained that he’d been to another party before ours and that he’d been brought by a young married couple called Norman, who were friends of Susan’s. He said his name was Derek Mallaby, but I didn’t pay much attention as I was so anxious to get the drink back to the party. There were cheers as we came back up the stairs, but in fact the party had passed its peak and from then on people drifted away until there was nothing left but the usual hard core of particular friends, and characters who had nowhere to go for dinner. Then they too slowly broke up, including the Normans, who looked very nice and told Derek Mallaby that he would find the key under the mat, and Susan was suggesting that we go to the Popotte across the way, a place I didn’t care for, when Derek Mallaby came and lifted my hair away from my ear and whispered rather hoarsely into it would I go slumming with him? So I said yes, largely I think because he was tall and because he had taken charge when I was stuck. The 400 Club was a nightclub at 28A Leicester Square. It was an expensive upper-class nightclub frequented by soldiers and pilots in WW2, where men had to wear tuxedos until 1957. It closed in the 1970s and went through a number of owners (including time as a sleazy gay disco) before its current incarnation as London's Late Club. quote:Of course, I was thrilled. The ‘400’ is the top nightclub in London and I had never graduated higher than the cellar places in Chelsea. I told him a bit about myself and made Astor House sound funny and he was very easy to talk to, and when the bill came he knew exactly how much to tip and it seemed to me that he was very grown-up to be still at school, but then English public schools are supposed to grow people up very quickly and teach them how to behave. He held my hand in the taxi, and that seemed to be all right, and they seemed to know him at the ‘400’ and it was deliciously dark and he ordered gins and tonics and they put a half bottle of gin on the table that was apparently his from the last time he had been there. Maurice Smart’s band was as smooth as cream and when we danced we fitted at once and his jive was just about the same as mine and I was really having fun. I began to notice the way his dark hair grew at the temples and that he had good hands and that he smiled not just at one’s face but into one’s eyes. We stayed there until four in the morning and the gin was finished and when we went out on to the pavement I had to hold on to him. He got a taxi and it seemed natural when he took me in his arms, and when he kissed me I kissed back. After I had twice taken his hand off my breast, the third time it seemed prissy not to leave it there, but when he moved it down and tried to put it up my skirt, I wouldn’t let him, and when he took my hand and tried to put it on him I wouldn’t do that either, although my whole body was hot with wanting these things. But then, thank heavens, we were outside the flat and he got out and took me to the door and we said we would see each other again and he would write. When we kissed goodbye, he put his hand down behind my back and squeezed my behind hard, and when his taxi disappeared round the corner I could still feel his hand there and I crept up to bed and looked into the mirror over the washbasin and my eyes and face were radiant as if they were lit up from inside and, although probably most of the lighting-up came from the gin, I thought, ‘Oh, my heavens! I’m in love!’ And with that chapter done, Hurricane Dorian will be on its way to Florida! I'll be back probably Wednesday assuming we haven't lost power here.
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Aug 30, 2019 14:43
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 Yeah I guess someone caught on to the label and they subbed in another white guy instead 
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Aug 30, 2019 15:00
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A little more about the Grand National: the men at the high society events who ride in the race would be extremely insulted if you mistook them for professional jockeys. Well-to-do amateur jockeys have always been a feature of the race (and British racing in general), and although qualification for amateurs has got a lot harder in recent years, it still isn't unusual to see an amateur taking the start (two took it this year), and amateur Sam Waley-Cohen managed to finish second in 2011. The race is extremely chaotic compared to American flat-track racing; the course is extremely long, the fences are extremely tall even compared to other races over obstacles, and the field for the National is 40 entries, double the number who enter the Kentucky Derby. It's usual for over half the field to fail to finish the race (in 2018 there were only 12 finishers), mostly due to falls at the fences, and although the course has been made a lot easier over the past 10 years, it is still not unusual for horses to die and jockeys to be injured during the race. The point being, even for a professional jockey it's a genuine sign of bravery, manliness, and achievement (if you believe in that sort of thing) to be classified as a finisher in the National, which is why Vivienne seems willing to entirely revise a sweeping generalisation based on it.
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Aug 31, 2019 01:49
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chitoryu12 posted:When we get to see Bond from someone else's perspective, it's...not the most flattering depiction. Let's face it, it hasn't been that flattering even in omniscient. Good luck with Dorian!
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Aug 31, 2019 10:43
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gently caress the haters, Viv is a nice change of pace.
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Sep 1, 2019 03:43
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chitoryu12 posted:Amasova was played by Barbara Bach, a half-Jewish native of Queens. She became a professional model straight out of high school and quickly became one of the top American models of the 1960s, which led into a hefty career acting in Italian giallos and other cheap European films. Her greater image after The Spy Who Loved Me helped get her some English-language roles, but she hasn't acted since a cameo in 1987. She still maintains some connections to fame: she's been married to Ringo Starr since 1981 and her sister Marjorie is married to Joe Walsh of the Eagles! Barbara Bach was in (and met her husband in) the elusive no-language film Caveman.
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Sep 1, 2019 06:21
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Somebody Awful posted:gently caress the haters, Viv is a nice change of pace. Hell yeah.
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Sep 1, 2019 06:55
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Just caught up. Digging the new book/protagonist but can we step back for a moment and consider how many times Bond gets clowned by a cephalopod in these books? Every single book a squid or a baby octopus or something almost kills him. Other dudes, he’s 360 noscoping while they barrel past at a hundred mph with his .22 with the sights filed off. But the second he sees a fish he shits his pants. When he faced off against Largo and Bond had the spear but Largo grabbed the baby octopus, that was his nightmare match up!
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Sep 1, 2019 19:12
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Bond was dipped in the River Styx to make him immortal but Hades thought it would be real funny to toss an octopus in.
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Sep 2, 2019 01:18
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Just FYI Pluto TV now has a James Bond channel. Channel 007, natch.
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Sep 2, 2019 04:23
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poisonpill posted:Other dudes, he’s 360 noscoping while they barrel past at a hundred mph with his .22 with the sights filed off.
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Sep 2, 2019 21:53
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 One day.
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Sep 3, 2019 18:20
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 08:14 |
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Since we’ve just left the Bahamas, I think it’s noteworthy to point out exactly what Hurricane Dorian did to it. https://twitter.com/benoit_tgt/status/1168838425660858368?s=21 The yellow borders show where land should be. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Sep 3, 2019 |
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Sep 3, 2019 23:03
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